Foursquare is more than just a technique for selling cars....it's an ever-growing social site that lets people check in at locations on their smartphones and claim specials. Foursquare and other location-based marketing sites like Gowalla and SCVNGR have been growing in popularity as more and more people use smartphones. Auto dealers need to take advantage of these sites to promote service discounts and other offers, driving people to check in at the dealership. It's simple to claim your dealership's venue and beginning offering specials to get more customers coming in.
Visit Potratz, an interactive automotive ad agency, online at *******ppadv****
Like us on Facebook: *******www.facebook****/PotratzAdvertising

If you want to use Gowalla to its full potential then you'll want to get started collecting stamps and pins. These are your little rewards for checking in with Gowalla and show other users how experienced a Gowalla user you are. We'll show you how to start earning these virtual trophies in this episode butterscotch****: *******bit.ly/gDpQL9

LBS. If you guessed embarrassing bowel condition or an alternative to the public broadcast system, you're way off. LBS in this case stands for Location Based Services; services like foursquare, Gowalla and more recently, Facebook Places. Services that ask you to share your location and offer status, rewards, coupons and special deals for doing so. LBS is already worth $2 billion and is only going to grow over the next couple of years, according to some industry analysts. Jay Goldman cuts to the heart of the matter, explaining what location based services are, why marketers and users are excited while offering a few words of caution about LBS and over sharing butterscotch****: *******bit.ly/db5F4O

This is the data SimpleGeo collected from the eight geolocated data providers (FourSquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Flickr, Bump, Brightkite, BlockChalk, and Fwix) during the South by SouthWest Interactive Festival. The live datastream was available on *******austin.vicarious.ly, but we thought people might enjoy a conference retrospective in data. If you'd like to have access to this data and more, and/or outsource your entire geolocation infrastructure to the experts in massive geodatasets, check out *******simplegeo****; we're in Beta right now, with a full launch at the end of March!
Created with Processing (*******processing****/ ).
Maps from the OpenStreetMap project (*******www.openstreetmap**** ).
Music: "Pocket Tanks," Eliran Ben-Ishai (DNA-Groove).

Live from SXSW, Kevin's buddy is checking the API for Gowalla vs. Foursquare and the results are damn close! Plus, Gowalla gives a free Gowalla branding iPod Nano for one lucky winner in the audience. Which do you guys prefer? Check out this new app, WhereTheLadies.at, that takes the check-ins from Gowalla and Foursquare that calculate how many chicks are at your location and how to find them! Can you say stalker?!

Location based services like Gowalla and Foursquare are all the rage right now, letting you check in to businesses, bars and restaurants. With major releases or updates to their apps on the iPhone and Android, we take a look at both and see which one reigns supreme!

*******rubenquinones****/2010/03/29/facebook-to-wipe-out-foursquare/
Back on March 9th the NY Times had a piece on facebook unveiling a location based feature integrated with status check ins. Was this intended for a head to head with foursquare? Not quite..